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Raspberry Pi wins out as V3 Editors' Choice 2012

Readers vote for $25 basic computer as device of year

In 2012, V3 introduced its quarterly Editors’ Choice awards. At the end of each quarter, our various product specialists sit down and decide which of the kit we’ve reviewed over the previous three months deserves a coveted V3 Editors’ Choice badge. To win one of these awards, we’re looking for truly innovative or unique technology, products that are first of a kind, game changers or highly desirable.

To go alongside the team’s five quarterly picks, we also run a reader poll to see which of our choices is your favourite.

As we come to the end of our first year of awards, we’ve taken a look at the results, to crown the V3 readers’ winner among the 15 products chosen by our technology editors during 2012.

And the award goes to …

Raspberry Pi.

Launched in February 2012 to much excitement, the Raspberry Pi received thousands of votes in our Q2 Editors’ Choice poll, accounting for a massive 88 percent share. We interviewed founder Eben Upton earlier 2012, and heard the organisation is now set up to build more than one million Raspberry Pis a year, so 2013 should be an even bigger year for the low-cost, bare-bones computer.

The Q3 reader choice went to the Google Nexus 7, which received 31 percent of the vote. Google’s 7in tablet was a game changer on two accounts: it made tablet computers accessible to millions more people with its low-cost £159 price tag; and it forced Apple’s hand in deciding to release a small tablet of its own in the iPad Mini.

For the fourth quarter, Softmaker beat out the likes of Nokia’s Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop to take the crown for its Office Mobile for Android apps. Forty-two percent of readers opted for the Softmaker app, which we picked as an Editors’ Choice for its comprehensive comprehensive features and file compatibility.

Well done to all those firms receiving an Editors’ Choice badge this year: